WFP says Sudan rations could be cut within weeks after receipts fell to a third of last year

Carl Skau, the World Food Programme’s acting executive director, told reporters on Monday 14 September, after eight days in Sudan, that the agency is running out of money and may be forced to scale back rations within weeks. WFP needs just under $300 million to sustain current operations in the country. It has received about $206 million so far this year, against $645 million in 2025 — a fall of roughly two-thirds in a war that has not slowed. Skau put 20 million people in acute hunger, 14 million displaced, about five million at emergency levels and roughly 200,000 at catastrophic levels; recent UN estimates place about nine million of the displaced inside Sudan. WFP currently reaches four to five million people a month, a quarter of the acutely hungry caseload at best. “We need to step up,” Skau said, after noting the agency had recently expanded its humanitarian air service.

These figures do not line up neatly with the ones humanitarian agencies were using a year ago, and the discrepancy is worth stating rather than smoothing. Human Rights Watch’s World Report 2026 cites WFP putting 24.6 million people in acute hunger and two million at famine or risk of famine, with 11.8 million displaced as of September 2025 — 7.4 million internally and 4.2 million in neighbouring countries. The displacement line has risen; the hunger caseload, as counted, has fallen. Neither movement is self-explanatory, and methodology is a plausible driver of both. Separately, UN agencies warned that nearly 20 million face acute hunger and more than 800,000 children risk severe malnutrition this year — UN News dates that warning to Friday, which may make it a distinct event from Skau’s Monday briefing. The ICRC reported on 6 September that active missing-person cases have passed 11,000, that 70 to 80 per cent of health facilities in conflict zones have stopped functioning, and that its teams treated nearly 5,000 weapon-wounded patients across 18 remaining hospitals in the first half of 2026.

Assessment: The operative variable here is not need, which is stable and enormous, but receipts, which have collapsed. Nothing in Skau’s briefing describes a cut that has happened; it describes an arithmetic that produces one if the gap is not closed. Treat ‘within weeks' as a funding appeal delivered in the grammar of a warning — that is what it is, and it is not dishonest for being so. The number that should travel is $206 million against $645 million, because it is the only one that names a decision taken elsewhere. Note also that the Council’s September argument is about weapons flowing in, not food; the two files are handled by the same capitals and never bargained against each other.